Laid on His Shoulders

It started with a complaint about who he ate with.

Luke sets it up in two sentences. Now all the tax collectors and sinners were gathering around to listen to Jesus. So the Pharisees and scribes began to grumble: “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

It was an accurate description. He did. And instead of arguing the point, he told three stories in a row, all about something that got lost.

The third one is the famous one. A younger son takes his share, spends it, ends up feeding pigs, and walks home rehearsing a speech. His father sees him while he was still in the distance and runs. People who have never opened a Bible know how that one goes.

The first one is shorter, and it works differently.

What man among you, if he has a hundred sheep and loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the pasture and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders.

Look at what the sheep does in that story.

Nothing. It doesn’t rehearse a speech. It doesn’t decide to come home. It doesn’t find its way back to the flock and stand at the edge hoping to be let in. It doesn’t do anything at all except be lost, and then be found.

The shepherd does all of it. He notices one missing out of a hundred, which means he was counting. He leaves the ninety-nine. He goes after the one that is lost, and the story adds four words that make it a different kind of promise: until he finds it. Not until it gets dark. Not until it’s clear the sheep doesn’t want to be found. Until.

Then he picks it up. He doesn’t drive it home in front of him. He puts it on his shoulders and carries it the whole way back, and the text says he’s happy about it. When he gets home he calls the neighbors over. Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep!

The son walked home. The sheep was carried.

That difference is the reason for this book.

It’s the third of three. The first, Bring the Baggage, took the son: the long walk home, the speech he’d rehearsed, the father who never answered his offer to be a hired hand. It was written for someone already on the road. The second, Outside the Building, followed sixteen people from Scripture who did their life’s work in fields, courts, prisons and kitchens, and almost never inside a sanctuary. It was written for someone wondering what they’re for now.

This one is for someone who isn’t walking anywhere.

Maybe you left a church years ago and don’t miss it, or miss it and won’t say so. Maybe you’re tired. Maybe you tried to find your way back once and it didn’t take. Maybe you’re honestly not sure anymore what you believe, and you’d rather not be talked into anything. If you’re on the road home, the first book is waiting for you. If you’re not, you don’t have to start walking to read this one.

Here’s what the record shows, read with the sheep in mind.

He did most of his finding outside. On roads, at wells, up trees, among tombs, at a city gate behind a funeral, on the next cross over. Some of the people he found were hiding. Some had been put out. Some were in the middle of a crowd trying not to be noticed. A few were walking the wrong way when he fell in beside them. Some reached for him, with a touch or a shout or a climb up a tree. Some did nothing at all. What none of them had to do was go back somewhere first.

You don’t have to go back to be found. He’s already on your road.

That’s the whole claim, and it’s the only time this book will make it. The rest is sixteen people, and the place where each one was found.

It isn’t a case against the building. There’s a man in here who was a ruler of his people and a teacher everybody listened to, and he’s in the book because he came at night with a question. There’s a soldier who built a town its synagogue. The building was never the problem. Nobody in the story says a word against the ninety-nine. It just isn’t about them.

It isn’t a plan to get you back inside, either. There’s nothing to join at the end and nothing to sign.

And it won’t tell you who you are. Nobody in these pages is going to diagnose you. You’ll recognize yourself or you won’t.

A word about who’s talking, once, and then I’ll get out of the way.

I spent twenty-five years on church staffs. I left in 2006 and haven’t been back on a Sunday since. I’m not writing from the far side of anything. I’m writing because these people have been good company on the outside, and because the story I used to tell from the front of the room was mostly about the son, and it turns out most people I know are the sheep.

Here’s how it works.

Each chapter is one person, and it starts where he found them. It tells what happened plainly, including the parts that don’t flatter anybody. Somewhere near the end of each story, one true thing is said once.

Then a short section called Where this meets your week, with a few ordinary situations where that life and yours overlap.

Then one small thing to do. It’s always the smallest move the person in the story made: a touch, a shout, a question, a thank you, remember me. Every one of them can be done tonight, alone, with no building, no title and nobody’s permission.

Ten of the sixteen people in this book are never named in the text. Nobody wrote down who they were. He found them anyway.

Every quotation comes from the Berean Standard Bible, a modern translation anyone is free to use, and has been checked against it word for word. In a few places the King James is quoted instead, because that’s the wording people remember, and the book says so when it does. Where the book leans on tradition or guesswork instead of the text, it says so. Don’t take my word for any of it.

One last thing about the sheep.

Jesus ends the story by saying there’s more joy in heaven over the one than over the ninety-nine. He calls it repentance. But look again at what the sheep did. It got found, and it got carried.

That’s the whole of what it contributed, and it was enough to start a party.